Karen Wright Marsh - Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians Who Transformed My Faith

HOW DOES ONE GO ABOUT LIVING A CHRISTIAN LIFE?

Thats the question Vintage Saints and Sinners addresses. Its answer can be boiled down to four slightly technical words: moral theology is hagiography. Put differently, the question of how to live a Christian life isnt answered by a list of dos and donts. Its answered by looking at lives that have been lived in response to Jesus.

I found myself pondering a few questions as I read this book. First, I noticed, quite simply, that lives lived in response to Jesus look very varied. Yet I wondered: Do the lives of Brother Lawrence and Sophie Scholl and C. S. Lewis, varied as they are, have anything in common? When we look at lives lived in response to Jesus, are there shapes that frequently recur? It seemed to me as I read, for example, that lives lived in response to Jesus are also perforce lived in peculiar relationship to the world. If you live in response to Jesus, the world will look different to you than it looks to your neighbors who, instead of attending to Jesus, pass their days in attention to the stock market, the New Yorker, or the devil. If you live in response to Jesus, youll look out your window and see a world created by God. Youll see the powerless crucified by the powerful, and youll see the crucified One rising, and because you see those thingsbecause you see the world with an eye attuned to Jesusyoull organize your life differently than your neighbor whose eye is attuned to the Dow Jones. Because they see differently and respond to what they see, saints often flout local convention and violate local norms. They often scandalize and unsettle. Sometimes they get arrested and killed.

In part because saints live in weird relation to the world, inviting the saints into your life can be tricky. Indeed, reading about a saint can occasionally induce despair. I read about the heroism of Sophie Scholl, and the demons who accompany me on my daily rounds perk up and say, If the standard is staring down Hitler and being guillotined on treason charges, why not admit that youre not really trying to live like Jesus at all? You cant even consistently remember to bring canned goods to church on the first Sunday of the month. And then the demons are off to the races, explaining that Im a pathetic excuse for a Christian and suggesting that instead of praying Evening Prayer, I rewatch the second season of House of Cards.

Heres the thing to say to those demons (I manage to say it about one-third of the time): I dont read about the saints in order to imitate them. I read about the saints because they show me something about myself. To be frank, I dont really want to live like Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa. But I do want to ask those saints to help me look at my life through the prism of theirs. Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century monk who wrote an enduring treatise about friendship, does not inspire me to join a monastery, but he can help me see what kind of a friend I am. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk, learned, through years of serving in his monasterys kitchen, to do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him. He can help me see how Jesus is transfiguring the ordinary mundanities of my own life.

As you read Vintage Saints and Sinners, notice which saints especially hold your attention. Not all of them will. You might particularly connect with one saint, or maybe two. (Notice, also, which saints particularly repel you; the Holy Spirit might be using your discomfort to draw your attention to something you need to see.) I suspect that over our lives, each of us is given two or three or four saints with whom to live in particular intimacy. Your three or four will be different from mine because youre gifted in ways Im not, and because youre damaged in ways Im not. Which saints is God offering you, to help illumine and burnish your particular gifts, and to help illumine and heal your particular damages?

This is a book about people, but its also about God. Its about God because when you carefully consider anythinga virus, a chocolate layer cake, a sparrowyoull ultimately see something about the way that thing participates in its Creator. Thats true of cakes and sparrows, but it might be especially true of people. People are created in Gods image, so when I study a person whose life is fully responsive to Jesus, I see what its like for an image and likeness of God to be in a world like this one. Take Francis of Assisi, who gave away almost all he ownedhe was, as Vintage Saints and Sinners puts it, liberated from possessions. The picture of Francis giving away money, books, clothing, sandals shows me something about my own lifeit sets in clear relief my intense possessiveness, and my unreliable spurts of giving things away. But it also shows me something about the God in whom Francis participates: Franciss life shows me that God is One who responds to a world in which things can be owned by undercutting and removing the possibility of ownership. Because the lives of Francis and Mother Teresa and Sophie Scholl are lives taken into Jesus, they show us something about Jesus himself.